Freedom and Our Fundamental Relationship to Life
Posted by otryba
“Freedom!” When you hear the word, what are the feelings that come up for you? I think that for a lot of us in the West, when we think of Freedom, we relate to Freedom-From before we connect to Freedom-For which is a deep reflection of how, ultimately we relate to our existence.
Consider for a moment that
In Your Life, There is Only One Relationship That You Will Ever Have:
That is Your Relationship to Your Experience
Let’s take this back to Freedom.
The quality of Freedom in your Life reflects the quality of Relationship that you have to your Experience.
That Relationship either reflects a Freedom FOR your experience, or a search for Freedom FROM your experience.
Post-Traumatic cultures are in an essential search for Freedom FROM our experience. We disguise this under all kinds of guises, from “spirituality” to “technological advance,” neither of which are wrong, but all of which are profoundly altered and often self-negating by our essential rejection of our actual experience and of what our senses are telling us about what’s actually going on.
As we take a look at this, we’re going to discover a dimension of Freedom that rarely gets talked about, much less EXPERIENCED, in our culture, and
This is the Freedom-FOR YOUR Experience.
When I say “Your Experience,” I am talking about the experience you are having right now, in other words the one that you may have been trying to get away FROM.
Are you with me?
Have you heard or said, “As humans we are all basically the same?” Well, yes, there are certain things that human beings ALL have in common; we eat, drink, sleep, seek warmth and connection, that’s true.
In my travels around the world, growing up, living, and traveling in a number of Western cultures, and in my experiences with indigenous friends in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala and Indonesia, I’ve discovered that humans are fundamentally different in their Foundational Relationship to Life. By this I mean our sense of Human Life as a fundamentally welcoming experience or one where we have to continually strive for our desired experience.
We are used to looking at this from cultural, linguistic, religious, environmental or philosophical standpoints. My Invitation to You, as a sojourner in Deep Freedom Now, is to examine it from an EMBODIED Perspective, from YOUR Experience of Your Life.
Researchers in neuro-anatomy & neuro-cardiology are discovering that different Ways of Life activate, suppress, and express the development of various parts of our capacity for awareness, connection, wisdom and intelligence in very differing ways. This leads to fundamental differences between Ways of Life and determines whether a Way of Life will lead to societal collapse and the decimation of the land after just a few centuries, or whether a people will be able to joyfully inhabit their place for thousands and tens of thousand of years, with human activity actually increasing the life and well-being of other species.
A simple way to look at this is in light of our relationship to Freedom, in other words our relationship to the experience we are having right now:
Do we embody Freedom For this experience or are we seeking Freedom From this experience?
Our embodied experience of our Life as an expression of Freedom From or Freedom For also determines what our relationship to the people around us will be, starting with newborns from the day they come into our world.
Look at your own life. Tell me what you experience.
©2009 Olivier “O” Tryba